It’s good stuff, but here are other items of note that have happened since gasoline was $1.34 a gallon (the good ol’ days, right?).

1. High-definition TV

Sony and Japanese broadcaster NHK developed a high-definition TV system in the late 1970′s in Japan called NHK Hi-Vision, offering stunning detail and clarity similar to 35MM films.

It wasn’t until 1987 that U.S. broadcasters petitioned the FCC to make spectrum space available for stateside HDTV. A U.S. standard was established in 1996 with public TV stations the first to offer HD broadcasts.

The 1999-2000 season of ABC’s “Monday Night Football” was the first live, regularly-scheduled primetime sporting event in HD. The first Super Bowl in HD (and in 5.1 Dolby Digital sound) was SB XXXIV in 2000 with the St. Louis Rams beating the Tennessee Titans, 23-16, in a game that was good to the last stop.

2. The Fox Box

It was such a simple idea that it makes you wonder why no one came up with this sooner.

On-screen graphics for sporting events are a staple of any broadcast, but Fox Sports was the first to keep what’s generically called a “score bug” on-screen continuously.

The “Fox Box” debuted during Fox’s first NFL telecast on Aug. 12, 1994, a NFL preseason game between the San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos. The box was transparent and anchored on the top, left-hand side of the screen with abbreviated team names, score, time and quarter.

David Hill, Fox Sports Media Group chairman and CEO, created the Fox Box. Hill told the website ArmchairQB.com “If you sit in a stadium, you always have a clock and a score there. So why not translate that to the television screen? That was my thinking when I dreamed the thing up.”

Originally used for soccer telecasts Hill produced overseas, he applied the idea to American football.

Audience researchers at other networks thought the Fox Box would fail, thinking if viewers tuned into a game that was a blowout, they would see the score and tune out.

What the researchers didn’t anticipate was those same viewers would return on a regular basis to see if the score had changed.

The Fox Box was a hit, leading to other on-screen graphics — such as Fox Trax telemetry data in NASCAR races, the first-down line in football games and K-Zone used in MLB telecasts.

3. Fox Sports

When the Fox Broadcasting Company debuted in 1986, nobody thought the network that thought Joan Rivers was the new Johnny Carson, made Johnny Depp and Bart Simpson stars and made 90210 the country’s most famous zip code would start a sports department with only one sport.

That sport, however, was the NFL.

Fox paid $1.58 billion, outbidding CBS by more than $100 million a year in 1993 for the four-year, NFC football package rights that started airing on Fox in 1994.

CBS had shown the NFL on their network since 1956. With no football, many CBS Sports personnel jumped to Fox, including Pat Summerall, John Madden, James Brown and Terry Bradshaw.

Using the NFL to promote Fox programming, Fox Sports built its creditability, gaining rights to NHL hockey, Major League Baseball and NASCAR. Fox also created Fox Sports Net, a nationwide group of 16 regional sports cable channel with a majority of NBA and MLB team’s contracts.

3. The explosion of Cable Sports Networks

Sports TV is considered by big business as a niche market. Back in 1990, most marquee college sports were mostly shown on ESPN with a smattering spread across on network TV.

ESPN2 debuted in 1993 as a sports channel for a younger demographic (ESPN as the “grown-up channel” according to the book “Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN”) with college basketball as a programming staple.

The niche sports market has exploded since then. College sports, including women’s events with everything from lacrosse to wrestling, can be found on ESPNU, BTN (formerly Big Ten Network), CBS Sports Network, the Mtn (Mountain West Conference channel) and Fox College Sports (Atlantic, Central and Pacific regional channel). Coming soon — but nobody knows where — is The Longhorn Network on Aug. 26 and the Pac-12 Network (along with regional channels) in 2012.

Every sport or league has either its own channel or a channel devoted to it. Some examples: